Music Scene: Aerosmith book will please diehards and casual fans

Friday

Dec 23, 2011 at 12:01 AMDec 23, 2011 at 11:16 PM

The holiday season is a great time to take a look at music books, and the obvious choice for a rock fans’ last-minute Christmas gift might be the new “Aerosmith: The Ultimate Illustrated History of the Boston Bad Boys” by Richard Bienstock.

Jay N. Miller

The holiday season is a great time to take a look at music books, and the obvious choice for a rock fans’ last-minute Christmas gift might be the new “Aerosmith: The Ultimate Illustrated History of the Boston Bad Boys” by Richard Bienstock.

This is your classic coffee table book, but at 11 inches by 9.5 inches, it isn’t easily portable at 224 pages.

The Aerosmith book is chock full of dazzling color pictures of the band at all stages of their career, and some of those early shots of the young musicians are really fun to see. The photos are arranged in such a way that you know someone spent hours on layout because there are plenty of tickets, press passes and backstage passes spotted around the pages, making the book a treasure trove of memorabilia. Concert posters, album covers, sleeves from long-forgotten singles, odd souvenirs from tours –– it’s all here, reproduced many times at actual size.

The Aerosmith book also has a breezy biography of the band, from their start to earlier this year, running right up to this summer, and including Steven Tyler’s relatively new “American Idol” gig.

The bio material is obviously drawn from a variety of published sources, and the author chose not to have a lot of distracting footnotes dotting the pages. Rather, he simply notes where certain nuggets of information came from, citing, for example, Milton writer Stephen Davis’ definitive band bio “Walk This Way” or drummer Joey Kramer’s “Hit Hard” as part of his narrative. (It seems the book was done before Tyler’s own autobiography came out this year, for it is not cited as a source.)

You could dismiss the bio portions as “clip-and-paste” jobs from other people’s work, but the intent here was obviously not to be comprehensive or to compete with the existing band bios so much as to provide a brief narrative that puts the hundreds of photos in perspective. In that respect, the story unfolds easily and with impressive detail, and it is an appealing reading experience.

Casual fans will no doubt find some information here they did not know, and it is well written and fast-paced. If Aerosmith devotees might already know much of this info, that doesn’t detract from the fact Bienstock provides a neat summary of the band and its individual members’ lives.

Accompanying the bio portion, every Aerosmith album is reviewed, with a small cadre of rock writers providing a lengthy assessment of each record. These reviews are in depth affairs and usually get down to cut-by-cut analysis, which the most rabid rock fans will relish.

There is, of course, plenty of detail about the various Aerosmith misadventures with drugs and alcohol, and if that won’t come as news to most local fans, Bienstock does a good job of providing contrasting views. Often times, the band members had widely diverging accounts of what was going on, but they’re all represented here. Especially well done is the period in the 1980s when the band basically broke apart, with Joe Perry and Brad Whitford drifting off into solo careers, and how they gradually came back into the fold.

It is also quite enthralling to read of how the “Pump” and “Get a Grip” albums cemented Aerosmith’s status as genuine American rock icons, after all five musicians had achieved sobriety in the early ‘90s. Even as they did start to dominate the charts like never before, some longtime fans worried that they’d become too poppy, too dependent on outside songwriting, and that’s an aspect that is covered as well. And details like the fact that their first “Aero Force One” plane was a Cessna Citation once owned by the late Philippines dictator Ferdinand Marcos are just delectable.

Aerosmith’s relationship and eventual 1996 breakup with manager Tim Collins is well researched. In fact, the way the band was taken advantage of in their formative days is also presented in fairly extensive detail, and becomes a compelling subplot as the story unfolds.

In short, this book is a must-have for the Aerosmith fan, and a very interesting read for casual music fans, with superb photo quality from a bevy of music photogs, including Ron Pownall, the band’s official photographer. And at $35, it’s not overly expensive, so rock fans, or those with rock fans in the house, definitely ought to consider it.

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